Cyberspace

On Thursday, the Canadian government said it has intention to “pursue all avenues to ban devices used to steal vehicles by copying the wireless signals for remote keyless entry, such as the Flipper Zero , which would allow for the removal of those devices from the Canadian marketplace through collaboration with law enforcement agencies.”

Funny, isn’t it? The Canadian government seems to not have any security expert to consult with. They don’t seem to understand how does the device works and don’t even understand how secure cars have been specially those produced since 1990s.

This attack requires a high-power transceiver that’s not capable with the Flipper Zero. These attacks are carried out using pricy off-the-shelf equipment and modifying it using a fair amount of expertise in radio frequency communications.

The Flipper Zero is also incapable of defeating keyless systems that rely on rolling codes, a protection that’s been in place since the 1990s that essentially transmits a different electronic key signal each time a key is pressed to lock or unlock a door.

To ban such device because it can (really can’t) open cars is just like to ban screwdrivers because they can open cars as well. Or ban kitchen knifes because they can kill people. Maybe the next step is to ban computers as whole because they can be used for illegal stuff too!

The Canadian government should address the real issue, which is to pressure car manufacturers into fixing their security flaws. Banning a device like Flipper Zero would only result in harming security enthusiast and taking away learning opportunities from them.

The device could be used to clone a hotel key card or change the TV channel in a bar, or open some garage doors but if a criminal knows how to use it, then the criminal surely knows how to build one from scratch so banning the device wouldn’t improve public security at all. If it does something, it just takes away opportunity from good guys who use it.

But the good news is that almost everything in Flipper Zero is free (as in freedom) . So you can study the source code and reproduce the programs in use and build your own thing, thanks to the essential four software freedoms granted to people under a GNU General Public License, which is a copyleft license, meaning it will remain free software.

Apple recently released a product name Vision Pro. It uses a proprietary firmware named visionOS, developed by Apple. It’s a computer, basically, and has features such as a camera, microphone, and wireless connections.

It can be used in various ways but is not suggested to be used at all. The mixed reality headset seems truly interesting, I also am tempted to use it as it’s very fascinating, but, after all, it’s a proprietary tyrant .

Tivoized products are injustices to users. Specifically regarding to giant companies such as Apple, they can be very harmful to people. These headsets will track users and violate their privacy. As they use proprietary operating systems, they violate people’s right to operate freely. Software used in them is not libre and people won’t have any control over how they use their computers or how they do their computing.

These proprietary tyrants won’t allow people to install a different operating system on them. These devices have measures to block execution of anything other than the “approved” system versions. They won’t allow people to run any program that won’t please the producer of the regarded computers (devices) and will force the users behave as they wish because the user supposedly entered into a “contract” when they started using it.

These computers are hell when it comes to users. They simply violate any basic right of users whenever they can just to make more profit. I’m pretty sure we will hear many news in near future about how the giant corporations producing these computers are imposing various forms of censorship and are interfering with how people are using what they bought.

We will hear news about how these devices helped with putting people under surveillance and how people lost their ability to use them because the producers decided so.

The technology is fascinating, for real, but they are not worthy of privacy and other digital rights. These devices are not just harmful to our digital rights, but are also a danger to us in real life as violations of our digital rights, most of the times, will result in violation of our basic human rights in real world.

These devices are for mixed reality experience, which means one more step towards making us slaves to these giant corporations in real life.

Take Proton for example. They advertise themselves as a “privacy by default” company. I used to admire their work and suggest them to people. I still suggest them to people who are in their first steps of reclaiming their privacy rights and moving away from Gmail and other proprietary dis-services.

But I don’t trust them anymore. I don’t know why but when a company grows to be large (relatively), serving hundreds of thousands, or possibly millions, of users, they lose my trust.

Something pokes me from inside and tells me that when they grow, they no longer work for my interest, but they work for their own benefit. When they become a giant, they become blind, they forget their initial mission and goals, and they do whatever they can to remain in business by all means, rather to work hard to protect their users.

Perhaps there are measures and hard work from their side to make sure they can’t violate our privacy even if they want to. The Proton case, for example, claims that they encrypt every inbox (or account) individually with our passwords as keys. Or they have an option to enable a second password on your account that further encrypts the account if I understand it right.

But that still doesn’t change my opinions regarding them. I understand that they perhaps do a lot to ensure that our data never ends up in the wrong hands (or any hands), but it’s still internet we’re talking about and it’s still us vs. a company that works for profit.

Of course that I may be wrong, but that’s how I feel about giant companies. I love this paranoia as it reminds me how much I still value my privacy and I haven’t get tired of protecting myself.

A not-so-new trend in building web sites is to use JavaScript and force users to launch applications in their browsers in order to be able to access a page. A benefit of that would be that a user who wants to surf different pages on a web site would spend less resources doing so but that’s not always the case.

Most of the times, a user simply wants to receive certain information from a web page. Sometimes we need some questions answered, see a photo, read an article, or download some media. That should be an easy task to do but since the web is now filled with this kind of web sites, that seems to be impossible.

Internet is now filled with web sites that are not simple HTML pages but annoying web programs. They particularly have endless scrolls, fail to show the real material while the program itself is loaded, are stuck on loading animations, fail to give you a universal or accurate URL to the page, and fail to deliver you the material you intended to receive and instead give you unwanted material you never asked for.

From my own experience, these web sites always prioritize their own interests and benefits above yours. You most-probably have visited these kind of web sites and if you ever disable your tracker-blocker, you’ll notice that the advertisements load alongside the program itself, using your computing power and resources, yet the material you wanted keep hiding behind the loading animations.

Quora, a so-called social network of questions and answers, loads a web program on your browser which the material will be loaded inside it. When, sometimes, I visit it to get an answer to a question someones asked it fails to load the full question and answer yet it never failed to show ads or useless parts of its web site.

One other annoying thing is those endless scrolls. Most annoying part of these web sites for me is that they always seem to have a footer where there are “about” and “contact” or “privacy policy” links on them but you can never reach to that. You always scroll until you see the footer but exactly when you want to click on those links, more material will load then you have to scroll down, again, to reach to the footer. Why bother with a footer if you’re not gonna let us use it?

Web is already gone to hell. With all the privacy violations, advertisements, misinformation, censorship, made-up useless standards, and forced designs onto it, it has already become a hell for many users. What we need right now is less programs and more plain polished web pages that simply deliver their material. There’s no need for us to load an entire program in our browser just to find out whether eating an apple is better when peeled or not.

Today’s invite to use Firefox and Firefox-based browsers is not about the browser war the Internet and Web community is typically involved in, but a war for open and free (as in freedom) Web. Since Google is trying to take away our freedom in Web browsing, it is now our duty to fight against Google and its plans.

One of Google’s power arms in this battle is Chrome. Through Chrome (and its base, Chromium), Google is enforcing new made-up standards that nobody wants except Google itself. Standards forced on users that are solely there to benefit Google and its partners. It’s now our duty to fight against them. It has always been our duty.

Any Chromium-based browser should be avoided. Doesn’t matter how the company behind your browser is removing Google’s DRM or how they advertise themselves to you, they should be avoided. I saw companies like Brave and Vivaldi protesting Google’s new war on Web but I think that’s ridiculous. They are some of the companies that are helping Google dominate in the Web browser war.

Using Chromium, which only results in Google winning the Web war, is a betrayal to the Internet and Web community and to all of us. There’s no excuse, there’s not “but”, there’s no good reason, it’s all false and hopeless justification of helping Google take away our precious Web.

Of course, I’m not saying Firefox and Mozilla are perfect but they’re now our only tools and power to fight Google. Our best shot is now Firefox and the cooperation of webmasters and sysadmins and an online civil disobedience against the Google’s efforts to impose its dictatorship on us.

I was going to put an exclamation mark after the title but I realized there’s no need as I don’t get surprised by hearing Google is doing something bad to the web. As Google does, they’re launching another attack on free Internet, this time by “Web Environment Integrity”.

Put in simple words, Google is giving developers an API through which they can approve certain browser configurations while forbidding others from accessing a service or a page. This means, assuming one implements it, one can prevent you from accessing their web page or using a service because you used Firefox instead of their choice of web browser.

The intro explains that the goal is to make sure the browser hasn’t been modified or tampered with in any unapproved ways. Given that Google is behind this, unapproved ways surely means whatever hurts Google’s tracking and data-harvesting.

See how you can read this post using your favorite web browser or RSS reader? That’ll no longer be the case if this WEI thingy is put in work. Do you use tracker-blockers on your browser for safe and painless browsing? With WEI they can force you to use the browser the way they want and it can force you not to block ads.

Imagine being forced to use an specific browser of their choice (not yours but theirs) and being tracked not by cookies only but by the browser itself (just like how Google Chrome does) and worse than that, imagine you’re blocked from accessing a web site because you tried to block trackers using an extension.

Well of course they claim that’s not the goal but what’s stopping them? Google has a long history of abusing users and collecting personal information to sell or use for advertisers. Google is not a hero when it comes to keeping promises and they’re not trusted with people’s data.

In the “non-goals” section of the project, it says they don’t want to “interfere with browser functionality, including plugins and extensions.” That’s a promise to not killing ad-blockers, even though the project mentions better advertising support as some of its goals.

It’s dangerous. Google will do anything to collect more and more information from users and to fight those who resist it. It’s dangerous to privacy, security, freedom, and integrity of open web. It will cause a lot of problems for people which are far more bigger than whether we see or not see advertisements.

Think about political activists who are forced to browse web using Chrome instead of Tor and their data is collected by someone who sells them to tyrannical governments. Imagine a human rights campaign organizer being forced to give away personal data and the whole campaign being compromised because of it. The Internet and web were never completely safe but imagine the last traces of privacy being wiped for the profit of a company and some CEOs.

It’s against everything that we stand for but most importantly it’s against our freedom. It’s targeting our freedom of choice, freedom of computing, freedom for information, freedom for Internet and people using it, and freedom of us against tyranny. We should fight against it. It’ll destroy what’s left of our free web and Internet.